Features
Debuts For Autumn 2009
Three powerful, moving first novels to keep you warm as the nights draw in
Glasshopper
by Isabel Ashdown
Myriad editions
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A moving novel told from two points of view: 13-year-old Jake in the mid-1980s, who’s trying to deal with his mother Mary’s alcoholism, his parents’ split and growing pains; and Mary herself, going off the rails from the 1960s to the present. An immaculately written novel with plenty of dark family secrets and gentle wit within. Recommended for book groups.
Legend of a Suicide
by David Vann
Penguin
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In a sequence of interconnected stories, Vann’s narrator, Roy, faces up to the legacy
and legend of his lost father, who killed himself when Roy was a child. Raw and powerful, and set amid the brilliantly evoked wilderness of Alaska, the stories unflinchingly record a man putting to rest the terrible ghosts of his past.
Kissing Alice
by Jacqueline Yallop
Atlantic
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A dark story of love, loss and family, unfolding against the backdrop of 20th-century England, this accomplished debut focuses on two sisters, Alice and Florrie, and their lifelong rivalry. In Yallop’s skilfully constructed narrative, long-buried secrets about their relationship with their father, and with the one man they both loved, return to haunt them.
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